The latest patch for the Natural Selection 2 Beta is now off to Valve! We're not sure when it will go on Steam but it should be shortly. If you have pre-ordered the game it should automatically update on Steam. If you would like to pre-order and get instant access to the beta, you can still do so here.

More responsive weapon switch and fixed bug preventing switch to previous weapon from always working

Undid change which only allowed players inside command structures to use abilities on those structures (ie, alien comm couldn't create cyst using energy from another hive)

Removed slow on damage

Increased air movement for all classes (skulks have the most)

Added slow on land for marines, so repeatedly jumping will reduce their max speed for a bit. Reduced marine acceleration somewhat to make this work.

Skulk leap is only available with 2+ hives

Increased skulk speed from 6.2 to 7 to balance out lack of hive1 leap and make him more Skulky

Reduced leap force from 12 to 10 to make it less of a "jump" in capabilities

Reduced max shotgun damage at close range from 20 back to 18 (I guess players engage much closer, much more often, which is outweighing the damage drop off)

Fixed problem where commanders couldn't always hear alerts

Marine sentries now have ammo and must be refilled from time to time

Attacking marine sentries makes them less accurate (the sentry fires through the actual model barrel now)

Sentries no longer change targets once they've acquired one, unless they are attacked, which causes them to target that entity

Sentries now fire exactly where their barrel is pointing, so damaging a sentry will make it less accurate

Added sentry alerts

Fixed cases where the Spores would fail (shooting at very close surface like ground or wall would go through the surface and the find targets cast would fail due to the player's origin being very slightly below the ground sometimes)

The marine will now cough when taking damage from spores (not from the marine's perspective yet, working on that)

Gas damage now ignores armor

Added commander camera frustum lines to minimap

Added new "auto-orders" that are given to marines that haven't been given orders by the Commander (build structure, defend structure, attack target, do what nearby players are doing)

Defend orders now complete after 10 seconds of the target not taking damage

Marine waypoints are now half transparent so they aren't too distracting

Fixed maintaining direction when walking through a Phase Gate

Added voice chat notification for any player to the HUD

Increased shotgun cost to 20 (make less prolific) and decreased max range from 20 to 15 (to make more focused on close range)

Robotics factory lets you set orientation when dropping it now

Cysts now damage from the outside to inside (ie, "outside" cysts must die before inner ones take damage)

Fixed an issue where ARC button would not show up as red if there was not enough team res.

Reduced grenade lifetime from 3 seconds to 1.5 seconds (after which time they explode)

Fixed minimap commander alerts to be positioned correctly

Added minimap blips for more entity types

Fixed bug that allowed the enemy team to infer the location of command stations, hives, and resource towers due to not displaying a techpoint or resource point for points with a structure attached

Acquires targets through "eye" in barrel, fires through barrel.

Changed "resources" and "teamresources" commands to "pres" and "tres" (as "resources" is an engine command)

Changed the ARC to spawn in front of the Robotics Factory

Made the ARC spawn after it opens the bay doors :P

Added PowerPoint fixed_power_up sound effect

Added MAC blocked alert and localized string

ns2_summit

Fixed leak in Crevice

Fixed collision geometry in Reactor Core

Added vent in Crossroads between the 2 marine entrances

Addressed several annotations

Less hitching (sound effects changes)

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Reworked Observation room

Fixed commander visibility issues

Added animated holo prop in marine expansion

Bug fixes and improvements

Various server performance improvements

Updated all of the external libraries to be compiled with version 8.0.50727.6195 of the CRT

Localization now uses UTF8 Strings and not widestrings

Changed the scoreboard code to use tables with named properties instead of a linear array (will be easier to deal with and thus, more robust)

Player:GetMaterialBelowPlayer() defaults to "metal" if no surface is found below the player (footsteps now play while walking over props)

Localized all strings in the game (tech tree, commander tooltips, player tooltip hints, structure death messages, etc.)

Changed the camera shake on giving damage to only trigger when attacking players (some people were reporting motion sickness)

"flinch" and "hit_effect" sound effects are now heard by the player taking the damage